


Drops of Blue

by greygerbil



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Hurt/Comfort - Character Doesn't Expect Tenderness But Gets It Anyway, Hurt/Comfort - Character hides their illness until they faint and everyone panics, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 23:01:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29161566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: Akksul and Evfra both tend to work late, but as Akksul walks into Evfra's office this night, he does not find him at the desk, but in front of it.
Relationships: Akksul/Evfra de Tershaav
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7
Collections: Bulletproof 20/21





	Drops of Blue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tentacledicks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/gifts).



When Akksul had finished cataloguing the latest batch of artefacts send by Resistance soldiers on Havarl, dug up in a cave the receding vegetation had only now released from its green grip, he glanced at the clock on his datapad and found it was long past midnight.

He often forgot the time sitting like this. Evfra had granted him a room at the Resistance Headquarters on Aya where he could be on his own – though whether that was for Akksul’s benefit or to spare others his sight was hard to say. The Moshae had offered him to come with her, but Akksul had denied her, unable to look at the kind face of his teacher after he had pulled a weapon on a man he used to study alongside, after threatening to blow up the markers of history the Moshae had taught him to love. He’d rather face the suspicious looks of the soldiers and Evfra’s bluntness than to have her soft voice and probing fingers rifle through his mind as well, however well she meant. How he had ended up on his doom-bound path was a question he needed to answer for himself first.

Akksul stood and gathered his datapad. He might as well report his finding to Evfra right now, since it was almost a given that he would still be here despite the late hour, and he would be too busy during the day.

_Evfra._

Akksul’s mind too often caught on him even now. He’d been a convenient target to pit his fury against as he watched his friends die around him in the labour camp, endured the lashings, watched his life fall apart like old ruins a little more each day. Why had Evfra and his men not come to save them? How did he have any claim to be a leader if he could not even do as much? Did the Resistance propaganda not ceaselessly parrot that story of him storming a labour camp just like the one Akksul had been locked up in?

But then Akksul had taken the reins himself, and looking back at his tenure with the Roekaar, it was painful to realise just how much worse he’d done. While he dashed his people and himself against the Initiative aliens, there had been countless others enslaved by the kett, dying at their hands, and the Roekaar had been more useless to them than the Resistance, instead choosing to get involved in skirmishes with an enemy who hadn’t even attacked yet. It was not that he had not wanted to help, it was just that there had been a thousand things to do, and he’d not the power, the men, the hours in the day, and most importantly the clear sight to do even one of them right, in the end.

Though so much of his own mind laid in darkness at this point, Akksul was well-aware that his anger for Evfra had long included a flicker of fascination that had only grown brighter after his own failure. How did he sleep when Akksul saw how tightly he had to keep his expression in control whenever a report of fallen Resistance soldiers was given to him, whenever a rescue mission failed? It was clear now Evfra was not the callous, careless man Akksul had wanted to believe he was, yet he had never even discussed giving up in the face of insurmountable odds and continuous tragedy, hadn’t broken, hadn’t been seduced by hopelessness in a decade. Akksul hadn’t even managed to do what Evfra did for a year without stumbling headlong into feverish madness.

It didn’t matter so much to have that mystery in the back of his mind, watching it expand into allure, since after all, Akksul had always loved uncovering and laying bare mysterious things. Nothing would come of it. Evfra would have had reason to hate Akksul much more fervently than he certainly already did.

Evfra was not in the main command central in the front, so Akksul turned to his office. In front of it he found two men and a woman in Resistance uniforms whispering amongst themselves.

“Is Evfra busy?” Akksul asked.

They glanced at him, the usual shadow of unease passing over their faces, but no one was about to start a fight this time.

“Maybe. He’s not answering the door or his communicator,” the woman said.

Akksul frowned at the closed door. Evfra was always busy, but rarely unavailable. The nature of his work demanded that he’d be ready to jump on an emergency at any moment, even while tending to other matters.

“Why not just go inside?” Akksul asked.

“We don’t want to disturb him,” one of the men said uncertainly.

Akksul barely managed not to roll his eyes. The respect some of the soldiers showed bordered on reverence sometimes, if not fear. So few seemed to be able to see that, when it came to small matters such as this, the bark was never followed by a bite. Akksul would know – he had spent hours upon hours arguing with Evfra in the dead of night since his return and he was not out on the street yet.

“I doubt he’d have trouble telling you if he didn’t have time,” he said, shouldering past them and pressing the button on the door with his flat hand.

At first, he did not see Evfra, though there was nothing in the office but the desk and a shelf with datapads as well as a narrow cot squeezed against the left-side wall. He only found him when he lowered his gaze even further than that.

Evfra laid on the ground, his back turned to the door. There was a smear of deep blue on the edge of the desk and a small puddle of responding colour on the ground under his head.

Behind Akksul, the young Resistance members gasped and exclaimed. Akksul simply stepped forward. He’d found so many corpses in his time in the camp, sometimes in the middle of the hallway, in their beds, draped over machinery they had been working, mangled in it, that his body reacted before his mind did. _Better check. If he is sick, we can hide him and hope he gets better before they notice he is gone. If he is dead, at least I can close his eyes before the kett burn the body._ He leaned down and grabbed Evfra’s hand, pulled the sleeve down and the glove up. His skin was burning, his pulse flying. _Life._

Evfra must have hit his head while going down, but thankfully, the bleeding bruise sat in the meat of his head fold, which would have protected his skull from a harder blow. However, there was dried blood on his lower lip and chin as well.

_He’s lucky he did not choke on it._

Belatedly, a rush of adrenaline made Akksul’s fingers feel cold, almost had his knees buckle. Those memories of the sick and the dead, they did not come without the helpless, angry panic attached.

_You’re not in a camp now._

“He’s just unconscious,” Akksul said, and his own voice brought him back to the present.

“Stars, what – what do we do?”

“There is a night shift in the infirmary. Someone run ahead.”

Akksul pushed his arms under Evfra’s shoulders and his knees and picked him up from the floor. His eyes fluttered and he groaned, but though he blinked briefly at Akksul, he didn’t seem to see him at all.

One of the young men shot down the hallway. Akksul followed slowly, accompanied by the two others, whose faces had grown almost white. For the reactions he got walking through the communications room, Akksul may as well have been holding on to a live grenade. Even the older, more experienced Resistance soldiers stopped in their tracks and looked around as if someone had pulled the plugs on their stations. Akksul ignored their questions, left it to the young ones to explain.

Evfra felled; it was new. Even Akksul, who was not prone to believe that Evfra could hold the angaran people up on his shoulders alone – had started a rebellion over that doubt –, felt his stomach turning, but perhaps that was because he and Evfra had been staring each other down every other evening for weeks now, had had too many conversations that strayed from artefacts to Evfra’s politics, where he led Akksul prod and question him, where they fought, where they even sometimes explained things to each other, maybe understood one another a little.

The night doctor, leaning over a bed, almost dropped her instruments when she saw him and then waved him on. Akksul followed her into a small, separate room and placed Evfra on the bed there, feeling the pleasant buzz of its bioelectricity field.

“We found him passed out.”

The woman pulled down the zipper of his suit to uncover his upper body. A jolt went through Akksul when he saw that, all over Evfra’s ribcage and stomach, was black and purple bruising.

“Where is that from?”

He knew it was not his right to ask, but he also saw that the doctor was young and looked frightened and Akksul still knew how to find that tone that made people want to jump when he told them to stand on top of the cliff, even though he did not believe in his own authority anymore.

“He was wounded at the battle for Meridian.” She grabbed a scanner from a nearby machine, tugged its flat surface over his skin. Evfra groaned quietly. “I don’t see internal bleeding, though, so it’s not coming from that.”

“He could have a chest or lung infection.”

Akksul remembered from his second month that a bug had made its way around camp. People had been coughing up blood before long, too. He’d felt Evfra’s body burning in his arms. _This did not start tonight. He spends his days in the same building as an infirmary and almost dies in his own office. Fool._

“That is my guess, yes. He is dehydrated, too.”

An IV drip stood ready. Sudden, dangerous fevers were an unfortunate trait of their kind.

“Could you hold down his arm?”

Akksul nodded his head. Evfra barely squirmed at the prick, though.

“How did he get the head wound?” the doctor asked, as she seated the needle on the back of his hand.

“I think he fell and knocked it against a table.”

As he said it, Akksul realised it was probably not hitting his head which had left Evfra out cold, but the fever.

“It’s a good think it went to the fold, that should have cushioned it.” She fumbled with the IV drip. “I’m adding a small booster that should wake him.”

“Avitaa?”

A man in a nurse’s uniform poked his head around the door. He could not help but stare at Evfra for a moment, but quickly tore his gaze away.

“I think Hamir is going to go into septic shock.”

“ _Skkut_ ,” Avitaa murmured with feeling, checking the IV drip again and hastily wrapping a brace studded with sensors around Evfra’s wrist. A machine threw up his heart-rate, temperature, other numbers that told Akksul nothing, and she scanned it. “I think Evfra should be alright for the moment. He just needs to wake up. I will check back in a few minutes – can you stay here and call me if his numbers change?”

 _She doesn’t know who I am._ In his standard Resistance uniform, he was just another soldier to her. If it were otherwise, she should have hesitated to leave him alone in a room with a defenceless Evfra.

“Yes,” he said.

She left the door ajar, but Akksul shut out whatever conversation she had with the nurse, looking back at Evfra as he sat in a chair by his bedside. To think that perhaps eight weeks ago, in one of those sweltering nights on Havarl, when he’d only wanted fire and blood anymore, he’d have tried to put a bullet between Evfra’s eyes if they had met.

Now he was his guard.

It needed only a minute before whatever stimulant the doctor had given him was doing its job, as he was shifting, his eyes opening, drifting shut again. Finally, some awareness came over his expression.

“Where...”

“Someplace you should have gone earlier.”

Evfra turned his head quickly, winced, grimaced. He gave himself a moment, opened his eyes once more but slowly, let them adjust to the light, glancing sideways at Akksul while he did.

“Why are you here?” he rasped.

“Because your doctor doesn’t recognise me, and the green youths I had with me when I found you acted like farren rats with their tails cut off when they saw you down.” He glanced through the gap in the door. “Let us hope your senior staff manages to restore order.”

Evfra pressed his lips into a thin line.

“Did everybody see?”

Akksul huffed.

“How do you think you got here from your office? I wasn’t going to carry you in circles around the building to find a back door.”

Evfra was silent for such a long moment that Akksul wondered if he had fallen unconscious again. He shifted in his chair, impatiently dragging his heel against the floor. Sniping back and forth with Evfra made the vice in his chest stop pressing. It was familiar by now. He wanted him to speak.

“I just barely remember that I made it to my office.”

“You did. You collapsed against the desk,” Akksul answered, gesturing at the wound on his head.

“I would have done better to faint in the hallway. Less edges,” Evfra said dryly.

“You might have been found sooner, too.”

Evfra hauled himself up. Automatically, Akksul reached out, placing a hand on his chest and pushing him down again.

“I need to talk to my people,” Evfra said, glowering at him.

“Are you delirious or stupid? You are just going to cause more panic.”

Evfra struggled against him, but he had no strength left.

“Why are you keeping me from my duties? _You_?” he asked, baring his teeth at him. However, his head fell back against the bed, his aggression easily tempered by pain. “The one thing you always saw clearly, even in the end, were my flaws.”

The sentence petered out as Evfra’s eyes almost fell shut again. He was still looking up under his hooded lids, but at the ceiling, not at Akksul. He coughed, swallowed it, shuddering as the tremor reached his chest. This sickness likely didn’t pair well with what had to be ribs still healing from fractures, by the colour and placement of the bruises.

Akksul stared at him, waiting for him to continue, but Evfra had spent his little remaining power. The fact that Evfra had paid any heed to any of his opinions about him was news to him. Evfra had always challenged Akksul on his scathing criticism of the Resistance, had defended his people, their work, that so many of them now seemed to adore the aliens, had made it clear that necessity forced their hand when it came to Meridian. Indeed, he’d passionately debated Akksul on matters of every decision he had made, told him why, had even admitted mistakes, yet had traced the roads of how he’d come to make them.

Now that Akksul thought back on it, though – he had never defended himself when Akksul had accused him of being ineffective and not up to the task of protecting the angara as they deserved. In the stream of flying accusations and barely-veiled insults, where Evfra hadn’t been timid to bite back about everything else, Akksul had not noticed that until now.

Why did it have to be these words that Evfra had picked out, Akksul thought in a surge of anger that was mostly directed at himself. Those had been the ones that were least true, products only of the thorns that sat in his own flesh.

He should have let it rest. Should have left Evfra rest. Yet, he could not but touch the soft underbelly Evfra had just revealed, not because he was malicious, but because he needed to know what laid behind the words.

“So you admit you have weaknesses?” he asked.

Evfra gave a weak huff.

“You have the scars to prove it.” He stared at the ceiling still, his voice quiet. “I’m not insane, I know I can’t save our people alone. I could always have done more, though, taken other turns...” Slowly, he pushed himself up on his elbow. “Every extra hour of sleep can be a new regret. One of the reports I dismiss in favour of another will come back to haunt me. I secure a settlement on Voeld, and when I come back, I hear I lost a village on Havarl.” He made a voiceless noise between his teeth. “What help is my guilty conscience to the dead and wounded, though? To you?”

With a shaking hand, Evfra reached to the needle in the back of his hand to tear it off. Akksul just managed to catch his wrist, momentarily stunned by the confession. Clearly, Evfra was in the grip of fever if he was speaking so freely to Akksul of all people, but he didn’t sound confused, just tired and angry.

He’d felt too much fascination with him before, and some of it had been respect and even a grudging affection, but seeing him like this, naked to the soul and still fighting a futile battle with himself, Akksul thought that for the first time he liked Evfra, without any reservations. He knew that desperation so well.

“You help no one if you die now being stubborn,” he told him, pressing his hand on the bed. “The Resistance is still too young to lose its leader without chaos following. The outsiders will have us in the palm of their hand. Lie still.”

“Are you sure? If I die, maybe they will give you another chance to lead,” Evfra muttered sardonically.

“I don’t want it.”

The person that had pulled a gun on Jaal and shot, the man who had been about to blow up the Forge; Akksul felt his skin crawl. He could not go back.

Evfra turned his head, his fever-blue face close to Akksul’s. “I know,” he said silently.

Akksul opened his mouth to ask since when; but then, perhaps that was a stupid question. He had brought him here, hadn’t he? If he had just wanted to keep an eye on him, he could have thrown him into a dungeon to rot. Evfra, of all people, had some hope for him.

Evfra cringed inwards as another cough wracked him, a wet sound that turned to choking again. Instinctively, Akksul hauled him up so that he could breathe more easily. Evfra swayed, fell into him. His bioelectricity field was overcharged by the bed, producing a pop of static and a shiver running all over Akksul’s skin. Since he already sat there, Akksul put his arms around him to keep him still as he coughed up more blood, some of it landing on Akksul’s trousers, the rest on Evfra himself.

“Damnit,” Evfra croaked.

Perhaps it was because Evfra was already in his arms, perhaps because he had imagined it before. Akksul placed a hand against the back of his head. He didn’t say anything, didn’t tell him to breathe or calm down. He’d always despised when people told him that himself.

Evfra sat still for a long moment, peered up at him, before he sagged against Akksul. Maybe he couldn’t hold himself up anymore or he pretended that it was so. Akksul did not question him.

Only when he heard hasty steps outside did Akksul place Evfra back on the bed.

“Evfra, you’re awake! I’m sorry, there was an emergency,” the doctor said, all but falling through the door.

“I’m alright,” Evfra said. “I must have caught some virus.”

“It might be more than that. Your wound should have healed already. It does seem to be aggravated. Perhaps you should have rested...”

The doctor stopped herself, glancing at Akksul. It was an impolite conversation to have with someone present, now that it was not an emergency and Evfra was awake, but with Evfra’s blood on him, the residue of his electricity still racing along his own skin, Akksul felt like it was his right to hear this. Still, he got to his feet.

“Akksul,” Evfra said, when Akksul had reached the door.

The doctor opened her mouth in shock. Akksul ignored her and looked at Evfra instead.

“Tell the others that I will be out of here soon, and that they should follow protocol. They all know it. Get them in line.”

“I should tell them you’ll be fine soon? After I just dragged your unconscious body in here?”

“You’ve made people believe wilder tales before.”

There was sarcasm in his voice, but a request, too, an honest one.

“I will see what I can do for your frightened flock,” Akksul answered, just as caustic, just as serious.

-

When Akksul returned in the morning after not sleeping much, Olvek was back to handling matters in the infirmary. He regarded Akksul with friendly professionalism and a hint of suspicion.

“Do you need medical attention?”

“I want to see Evfra,” Akksul said.

Olvek inhaled a little deeper than he may have had to. “I don’t think he wants to discuss anything right now.”

Olvek had the night shift sometimes, too. He had seen Evfra and Akksul squabbling often enough.

“I am not here to fight with him. I just want to see how he is.”

Again, Olvek looked doubtful. Sickness, especially when it was not life-threatening, was seen by the angara as a reason to give someone space. In that, the aliens were different, too. It was like they could not stop sitting on each other when they were ill, as Akksul had seen with the APEX soldiers stationed here.

But then, Akksul had long lost all shame, too. They had not had luxuries like manners in the camp, had to care for each other when they were sick, since no one else would come. It had planted the deep-rooted thought in his head that he had to check up on the sick or risk their suffering. Akksul resolutely pushed away the thought that it put him even in slight proximity to the outsiders.

“Can you ask him if he wants to speak to me?” he added.

He had a feeling, or perhaps just hope, that Evfra would not deny him.

Olvek gave a slow nod and turned around. When he came back out of the small room, surprise was still clear on his face.

“Come on in,” he said.

Akksul nodded his head and walked past him.

Evfra still laid in bed, but his face and head were clean of blood, the bed was angled up so he could sit, and his eyes were clearer.

“I heard you managed to calm people down last night.”

“Luckily, you have some capable senior staff. I directed the younger ones to them and told them you were not in danger.”

Evfra nodded his head. “I should be back on my feet soon. Hopefully tonight.”

“I was also smart enough not to promise them that, so take my excuse,” Akksul said harshly as he stepped up to his bed.

“You really have gone soft on me,” Evfra said quietly, eyeing him.

That meant he remembered last night, Akksul supposed. He didn’t answer. Evfra had not shied away from his touch then, either, did not protest it now.

“I didn’t thank you yet for bringing me here,” Evfra said, after a long moment. “You were helpful last night.”

That seemed to cover more than just Akksul not allowing him to keep bleeding all over the floor. Akksul nodded his head.

“If I really want to be helpful, apparently I should stay here to make sure you don’t climb out of the bed – or expire. Most people are not unreasonable like you, but I have seen the latter before,” Akksul muttered.

People he’d cared about had died in dirty, crowded cots in their sleep; or people he’d _also_ cared about, he should put it, if he was honest with himself.

Evfra regarded him carefully for a moment and Akksul cursed himself. Tough he’d made his voice cold, had wanted to say it as a dismissive joke, he must have betrayed by some twitch, some flicker of his gaze, that he really wanted to stay. Evfra had always been too good at spotting the hurt that sat sideways in his chest like a metal spear.

However, Evfra did not push him, just shrugged his shoulder. “Olvek has better things to do than check in on me all the time, so you won’t be in his way. I’m probably going to fall asleep soon, though. Too many drugs in my system.”

Akksul dragged the chair closer. “I don’t need to be entertained,” he said as he sat, embarrassed that Evfra had seen through him, relieved that he allowed him to stay.

As he looked at Evfra, he noticed that the cables that connected him to various drips and machinery were tangled between his elbow and the mattress. He reached out to tug them free, his hand brushing over Evfra’s arm, and Evfra stared back at him, but he didn’t pull away. Akksul left his hand there as he pulled out a datapad with the other. As Evfra settled into the pillows, he turned just a little further against Akksul’s hand and Akksul squeezed his arm, a calm coming over him again that had eluded him all night.


End file.
